Monday, August 16, 2010
Stronger passwords
From a new report on how much better the odds now are for brute force password attacks that employ modern processors. The main point, anything less than 7 characters is crazy and even 12 may be vulnerable without some compositional complexity.
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Tuesday, August 10, 2010
New data comparing ineffectiveness of antivirus products
There’s really no good news here for antivirus vendors, or their customers.
Cyveillance, which touts itself as “a world leader in cyber intelligence”, has a press release announcing a study that seems to reveal the (really) bad news.
[T]raditional antivirus (AV) vendors continue to lag behind online criminals when it comes to detecting and protecting against new and quickly evolving threats on the Internet. Cyveillance testing shows that even the most popular AV signature-based solutions detect on average less than 19% of malware threats. That detection rate increases only to 61.7% after 30 days.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
A pleasant surprise: partimage and gparted to the rescue
The new Dell laptop here at home took a dive this week. Completely unresponsive to the power button, except for a very low volume whir from the cooling fan. After running the gauntlet of Dell’s support phone tree (as usual the automated system erroneously identified the our hardware as out of warranty when it still has another 9 months to go), we got hooked up with a very nice tech who quickly determined that we needed a full replacement. “Equivalent or better”, or words to that effect.
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Saturday, July 31, 2010
Putting the DNS-321 to work as a home server
A short time ago I wrote about my purchase of a D-Link DNS-321 NAS device.
This article will describe how I set the device up as a home server to provide a number of common network services.
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Thursday, July 29, 2010
Tomorrow is System Administrator Appreciation Day
Tomorrow, July 30, 2010, is the 11th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day.
In honor of those (we?) unsung heroes of technology here’s a music video I found that says it all. Check it out after the bump.
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